1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a method of recognizing a contactless fingerprint and an electronic device for performing the same, and more particularly, to a method of recognizing a contactless fingerprint using an electronic device configured to display a guide screen on a display of the electronic device for recognizing the contactless fingerprint.
2. Description of the Related Art
A fingerprint recognition system of the related art needs a high resolution fingerprint recognition image so as to obtain a high recognition rate. A method of acquiring an image, on a mobile terminal for example, may include a user contacting his or her finger to a separate dedicated sensor so as to acquire a consistent high resolution fingerprint recognition image. When the user uses a contact fingerprint recognition system that uses the dedicated sensor, additional expense is necessary for providing the dedicated sensor to a mobile terminal, and fingerprint recognition performance may be influenced by various factors, such as the dryness of a user's hand or distortion of a fingerprint pattern according to a force applied to the dedicated sensor when a fingerprint image is acquired.
Meanwhile, there is a method of acquiring the fingerprint image of a finger in a contactless manner at a predetermined distance from a mobile terminal, e.g., a cellular phone, without a separate dedicated sensor by using a camera embedded in a mobile device. The contactless fingerprint image acquisition method may acquire various fingerprint images. However, with such a method the same user's finger is captured according to a posture of the user's finger, a distance between the camera and the user's finger when an image is captured, and a capturing angle of the camera, and thus it is often difficult to obtain a consistent feature when extracting a feature for fingerprint recognition.
Therefore, performance of contactless fingerprint recognition is inferior to that of contact fingerprint recognition.